Gold

The Dismal Science Fiction

Montreal played host to the 67th annual WorldCon Festival last week, arguably the largest gathering of the socially uncomfortable upon the island since that summer Jim attended GoonFest. Notable guests included Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, and Paul Krugman. I think that last guy wrote some Twilight derivative, but I'll have to double check.

Yes, oddly though one can't say surprisingly enough, Paul Krugman is apparently quite the science fiction fan. Inhabiting only the nerdiest intersection of that Venn Diagram of Interests and Hobbies, Krugman, that sci-fi lovin,' econ-modelin,' New York Times collumnin' stud certainly must have gotten all of the ladies in high school.

Interested to see where else Krugman's interest in science fiction might have taken him over the years, I stumbled upon The Theory of Interstellar Trade. This was written by Krugman in 1978 and certainly it must have been a joke--a 15-page joke that never really decides which of the two is more self-satisfyingly hilarious: obscure Asimov* references or equally obscure economic puns.

God fucking dammit I am so glad he won the Nobel Prize.

Allow me to give you an impression of just how awesome an academic accomplishment this is:

"This is an inertial problem--which becomes a weighty problem in a gravitational field..."

Sarah Pinnington, eat your heart out.

"Among the authors who have not point this out are Ohlin (1933) and Samuelson (1947)."

Tongue, meet cheek. Now get ready for the cosmic burn:

"The second feature of interstellar transactions cannot be so easily dealt with (physicists are not as tolerant as economists of the practice of assuming difficulties away)."

Oh, snap Yale economics faculty of 1978! That one must burn like a quasar!

But he's only just warming up:

"It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a seriously analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

Paul Krugman: truly putting the "dis" in dismal science.

And if any of you were actually curious, his primarily conclusion is that when trade is interstellar, interest payments should be based on the rate perceived by a planet-dweller of one of either of the two trading planets and not on that perceived by a time-dilated space ship entrepreneur. Also, interest-rates between trading planets will be equalized through arbitrage. Space arbitrage.

Good to know, no doubt.

*Please, Sol, allow me back upon the stage of your mind. I'll do naked if you want.

NDP finally gets their hockey support

The Globe this morning, in a page 3 story about the NDP's current conference to figure out how the fuck they're going to ever actually do anything in Canada, has a picture that shows they might have finally figured it out: hockey.

Hockey's long been intertwined with Canadian politics. If Jackie Robinson's career was a milestone in civil rights for black Americans, certainly Maurice Richard, despite the shitty documentary, was the same way for French Canadians. Ken Dryden, the Stanley Cup-winning and Hall of Fame-being-in former Habs goalie and Maple Leafs owner, is the Liberal MP for the riding my high school is in. And of course, Don Cherry has been the leader for legions of Canadian racists who used to vote Alliance and now vote Conservative. In fact, I wonder if there's a good book that's been written on the subject... Sarah?

Anyway, at the NDP conference, Andrew Ference, apparently of the Boston Bruins (though I've never heard of him), spoke about "500 NHL players [who] have chosen to pay offsets to the carbon they produce," such as in their $2000 carbon fibre sticks that break three times a game.

I think if Mr. Ference, if that is his real name, actually spoke up at places other than the NDP conference that is getting embarrassingly little coverage (though to be fair I don't read the Star), it could actually make a difference. Canadians care about both hockey players and carbon emissions, and hockey is not exactly the most carbon-neutral sport even without team buses and planes (think about how many hockey rinks need to be kept air conditioned around about 10 degrees even during July). Having famous people who aren't David Suzuki (as much as I love the man) tell us about why they like what the NDP does is a good idea. So maybe Layton could get something like this going somewhere big and public where people who might be pursuaded would notice, instead of to fucking members of parliament in his own party.

This is a real gem.

So lately, Ottawa has been pretty focused on the trial of Larry O'Brien, who was accused of influence-peddling but recently acquitted. Lisa MacLeod is a Conservative MPP from Ottawa who commutes to Queen's Park (the Toronto seat of the Ontario legislature) and who is married with a young daughter. The judge in the O'Brien case dismissed her (damning) testimony because being married was a "distraction."

Seriously? Here's what MPP MacLeod had to say about it:

On Monday, Ms. MacLeod, the Conservative MPP for Nepean-Carleton, called the judge's reference “pathetic” and “surreal.”

“I didn't know truth had a gender or a family,” she said.

The article also quotes her as saying that it's not necessarily the outcome of the case that bothers her, but rather that her statement to the police was disregarded because there can't possibly be enough room in her tiny lady brain for worrying about work AND family AND political corruption.

Ugh. The only good thing to come out of this article was a statement by Equal Voice, which is a great organization.

via The Globe and Mail

SWEATER COWSSS

a taste test, so to speak:




me, i am havink the feelink of vomitink in mouth.

BOOBIES

Just though I'd continue with the theme set by Lion's post.

Quick note on something hilarious I read while perusing the gossip blogs that are my Internet equivalent of Real Fruit gummies:

On August 5th 2009, Marie wrote:

I don’t know if it’s because everyone has fake boobs, I’m starting to think that the real thing are the weird looking ones...

The end of that sentence is "or because she's a kid," which I did not post because it's in reference to the fact that the owner of said chest puppies is Vanessa Hudgens, a Disney star - and she was allegedly 17 when she took the pictures that were then leaked from her Blackberry. But for the purposes of this post, that's neither here nor there.

Rather, I wanted the opinion of a captive audience of (possibly more than) 3. I still firmly (ha!) believe that fake ones are the weird ones, but maybe I'm just strange. Do fake (and we'll include airbrushed and retouched/Photoshopped-beyond-reality in that folder) breasts look "normal" to you now, such that real ones seem sort of...off?

The reason why I think this is interesting is that as far as Photoshopping women (and men) to seem more attractive, my initial gut reactions to the photos are often a 50/50 split on whether I find them attractive or not. This is a great website with before and after versions of retouched photos of celebrities. I'm also coming from a position in which I know that most photographs are retouched, and I have a very healthy self-image. What I find interesting is where we would draw the line between "attractive" and "weird" when it comes to things that are supposedly more enticing than the real thing, and whether or not - or how often - the "better" version has replaced the mental image of the real thing in our minds.

Nah, just kidding. I just wanted to talk about boobs.

(shout-out to the brilliant folks over at Sociological Images for the website about photo editing).

do-nothings

i happened, today, to read a piece on the blog naked capitalism, written by a theretofore-unknown-to-me contributor named 'lune', entitled 'congressional legislation part II.' in the post, lune analyzed the legislative process in the context of the contemporary institutional culture of congress. the big point, or what i thought was most prominent, was that much less time in congress is available to congressmen and women. lune proposed that this was due to a greater pressure to fundraise now than was previously extant. as the story goes, officials used to move to washington upon being elected, affording them ample time to spend five days a week doing their jobs. now, however, such devotion to the forty hour workweek is the exception rather than the rule, most congressmen and women choosing instead to commute in on tuesday from their home states and leave again on thursday. the rest of their time is spent filling up their coffers to ensure ample supplies for their ever-costlier reelection bids.

it's important to know that this argument is essentially a paraphrasing of one made by a writer named norman ornstein. ornstein, writing two years earlier in the washington post, said exactly the same thing. the number of days spent in deliberation that lune quotes for the congressional session 2006, 71, is also the number provided by ornstein, though lune cites a later abcnews article as his/her source. that's fine; i don't believe that lune was plagiarizing, only that the whole thing may have been recycled a few time since it left ornstein's keyboard. ornstein's case is quite compelling, and it seems, at first glance, that the numbers are irrefutable. in 1947, having spent just 104 days in session, the 80th congress caused an uproar when it was labeled the 'do-nothings' by president truman. nowadays, ornstein says, we'd be lucky to see our representatives working so hard.

i admit that i was swayed when i first read both lune and ornstein. something seems very wrong with the way that congress works, namely, that it never gets anything done. i decided that i would post on the subject, and that, instead of merely rephrasing it for a third time, i would go to the data and provide some original insights. maybe i would make a chart comparing the downturn in length of congressional sessions to the upturn in campaign costs since some faraway year. the senate, i discovered, keeps records of congressional activity, and has done so since 1947 (coincidence?). it was here that things became complicated. i'll let this graph explain why.

first of all, the trend in the number of days spent in session is flat, if not slightly increasing. more important, and more visible, however, is the trend in the total number of hours. this is quite apparently on the upswing. i don't know where ornstein got his data, but congress's records do not corroborate his story. congress, by all accounts, is working harder than it used to.

it was then, however, that i began looking for other metrics to gauge the legislature's productivity. working time itself is no absolute indicator of working success. maybe they stay up later because there's better chinese take-out in washington than there used to be. maybe they buy a lotta sex. i don't know. lucky for me that the congressional records include statistics for the legislative process. this includes bills and measures passed, as well as measures introduced, quoroms, etc. i chose only the first three to operationalize my dependent variable (congress's laziness), largely because it's a wednesday and i should be doing other, paid work. what do the charts say here?

now, that's more like the congress i know. the trend here is irrefutable: there has been a dramatic decline in the productivity of congress since the 40's. all those extra working hours have translated into a 50% decline in measures passed and a 70% drop in bills enacted. as for measures introduced, the trend is more of the same:

that spike in the late sixties and early seventies aside, the mean for the past three decades is at least 10-15% below what it was in the 40's and 50's.

what are the potential problems with this data? first, by beginning in the 40's, it conceals the bump effect of the federal government's enormous expansion during the 30's. it could be argued that congress simply returned to a longer-term historical average post-1970, so that the intervening four decades were little more than an aberration. i don't have the data to confirm or disprove this, but i think a strong statement against it is made by comparison to the consistently longer hours congress has been spending in session since '47. if that had trended downwards as well, i would be more inclined to dismiss the recent slump in legislative activity. as it stands, my hackles are still up.

what's left to explain is why. have bills become longer? is it really true that legislating has become more complex, as a greater amount of information has become available? i'm inclined to believe that the growth of the lobbying industry during the 70's has something to do with it. congress may spend a lot more time tacking riders onto bills than it used to, which would account both for the mammoth size of bills and the time it takes to produce them. anybody know where i can find the average size of a law these days?

Yes Satoshi, tell us why feminism is unnecessary

Here is a lovely article from Satoshi Kanazawa about why modern feminism is "illogical, unnecessary, and evil."

I don't normally re-post dreck like this - mainly because I don't think that it's worth repeating. That being said, there are a few things about this particular gem that I just can't ignore - the first being that it is posted on the website of a legitimate publication, not Joe Wingnut's Weekly Woman-hating Whangdoodle. The author, Satoshi Kanazawa, is a Reader in Management at L.S.FUCKING.E.. It is an opinion piece, and regardless of how offensive it is, I respect this shmuck's right to his own (misguided) opinion. I do, however, take issue with the fact that as an evolutionary psychologist, his opinion counts for a little more than your average nutbar screaming about how the feminazis took his job.

Right off the bat, he bases his argument on the oft-repeated tenet that "feminists think that men and women are identical ha ha those silly feminists and their poor understanding of biology." He took that particular point from Susan Pinker's book "The Sexual Paradox," in which the author points out that men and women are NOT identical. Clearly someone needs to point out the difference between "equal" and "identical" to this guy. They both end in "-al," so I can see why he may have been confused. But in all seriousness, if this guy had bothered to do his homework, it should have been pretty clear that the argument for women's equality is hardly based on the premise of men and women's identical biologies or psychologies. It may be based on the fact that both men and women are human beings, and therefore deserve equal treatment, but identical? That argument has gone the way of the dinosaur, and nobody is claiming that that's why men and women should be treated equally.

It just gets better from there. He argues that the fundamental differences between men and women make it difficult to assess their welfare - like comparing apples to oranges - and so it's really impossible to say that women have historically been worse off than men throughout history. That makes sense. You can't really compare a basket of apples that have been sitting on top of a box of oranges, squishing all the juice and life out of them, with that box of oranges, because they're completely different things! The oranges were put on earth to support and nurture the apples, not come into their own as separate but equally delicious entities.

I have to say, however, that my favourite argument of all is for the evils of modern feminism and goes as follows: as feminism came into its own as a political and social movement, women's reported happiness decreased. Obviously that's because feminism allowed women to earn more money, which in turn made them as unhappy as men. It couldn't possibly be that as women began to take their own place in society, they became aware of just how much more work feminism has to do to bring about equality, or because in addition to working full-time women are also expected to do the bulk of childcare and domestic duties. Kanazawa graciously admits that rising divorce rates and higher levels of single mother-hood may have contributed, but resolutely clings to his hare-brained idea that women were so much better off as unempowered, under-educated, mistreated domestic servants in all but name.

I can't really explain how angry this article made me. The misogyny and woman-bashing are bad enough but frankly not particularly original. It's his blatant unwillingness to do a little research about feminism instead of blindly rushing in and discrediting decades of hard work by famous and nameless women that really gets me. The tagline for the article basically sums it up:

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are men."

If that's really how he feels about feminism, I suggest that LSE, Psychology Today, and any other organization of any repute do some long, hard thinking before they allow someone with such a regressive and dangerous view of human interactions to affiliate himself with their name. I sincerely hope that this article is taken as the deranged ramblings of a bitter man, rather than a legitimate piece of social commentary.

via Shakesville

Compromise is a Dirty Word

I don't know whether to be appalled or not. Those of us who like the geer helplessly at the sidelines of American politics have by now grown accustomed to the fact a half-way decent piece of legislation in Washington is a piece of legislation that will die a slow, ignoble death in committee. Occationally a bill is passed that, despite the predictable bloat, unquestionably serves the common good. And when such a bill comes along and, wouldn't you know, is actually passed, I can't help but feel a little let down. The warm embrace of disappointing compromise is familiar and expected and safe. If something good is actually going to come out of Washington, I would at the very least like to see a Mr. Smith moment. But instead, these moments pass as, or at the very least, exactly like business as usual and the fact that these corruptable assholes can just as easily turn around and vote with half a conscence reminds us that they were there to do it the whole time--sitting on their hands and collecting contributions.

But I don't know about the latest House health proposal. I think it would be much easier for me to declare without reservation and too much thought that this most radical of the three health reform compromises is, just like everything else, a big pile of shit. It is possible however that, as far as compromises go, the Energy and Commerce Committee offers us a real one. That is, it offers us a bill that most people who aren't paying their third mortgages with insurance company cash can live with. The public option is included. That seems good to me. Subsidies to those under and around the poverty line are included if somewhat reduced. That seems good too. Perhaps most importantly, insurance industry best practices are to be enforced. So overall, maybe this is not so bad.

But some would beg to differ. There is a seemingly technocratic tweek in the bill, a little something thrown in for the Blue Dogs, that would separate the infant public insurance program from the bargaining leverage of Medicare. That is to say, the new plan will have to negotiate their fees with doctors and hospitals without its muscly, half-way insolvent big brother standing behind it. And to some that makes all the difference.

If not, he is going to have a lot of pushing back to do. It begins by realizing that while this is an inconsequential detail to just about every American, the change actually dynamites the entire plan. Operated within Medicare, the new public option would have limited marginal administrative costs. It would have a large pool from the beginning, with leverage over virtually every provider. I don’t understand – not I don’t support, I do not comprehend – why there was ever a proposal to pay x% above Medicare rates in the public option. If Medicare rates are too low, or geographically unfair, or anything else, then change the Medicare rates. If a doctor is willing to perform a procedure for $d for a Medicare patient, in exchange for the opportunity to serve the large population of Medicare patients, he should surely be happy to continue performing procedures for $d for access to the combined Medicare and public option populations. (source: Taunter)

Or she, buddy. The glass ceiling on complaining about legal liability and getting underpaid by Soviet Medicare has long since been shattered. The ladies are now free to opt-out of treating Medicare patients too, you know.

By contrast, stripped of Medicare support and pricing negotiation,* the public option is a startup insurance company, no more and no less. Actually, a lot less – it has to hire the worst administrators (everyone in the sector already either went for the money at a private operator or the security at CMS), it has the nimbleness and marketing savvy of a government agency and the purchasing power of the smallest guy in the industry, and it will almost certainly have a disaster of an insurance pool. It will be the one sucker offering community rating in a risk rating game. It’s like joining a poker table and playing cards-up.

I hope he isn't right. Because the way things stand now, I can't imagine that the final product will look much more progressivee than this. The downside risk, on the otherhand, is virtually infinite.

And so I can only hope that Taunter is overstating things. Maybe the bargaining power of the public option will be minimal. And maybe the plan will end up getting stuck with an adversely selected cadre of unemployed tumerous hunchbacks. But maybe there's something in a different business model. Maybe the fact that, as a public institution that is committed to breaking even and not, as are pubically traded insurance companies, bound to producing increasing year over year profits, the public option will be seen as a fundamentally more reliable--unlikely to rescind policies and committed to keeping medical cost ratios high. Whether it is an individual looking for health care or a company hoping to attract employees, there is always the possibility that the public option, despite its inability to offer substantially lower premiums, will be seen as a fundamentally more reliable.

But I really don't know.

*Note that Medicare fee structures offer disasterous incentives for health care providers. Public option aside, fixing that will go a long way to fixing the fiscal side of things.